That feeling when you see Monday’s strip and realize you’re in for another entire week of Harry Dinkle writing about Claude Barlow (1543-1627)…the first day of six where we’ll watch ol’ Harry in panel 1 setting up the gag; panel 2, building to the punchline; and panel 3, where Dinkle delivers the payoff and sits there smirking. Dinkle’s now writing the Volume 6 of his Barlow bio…imagine slogging through six volumes where every third sentence is a jokey response to the two sentences that preceded it? I can’t even take six strips.

This is like watching a garbage truck drive by and thinking, “Those things are kind of fascinating, aren’t they? All those hydraulics crushing all that waste…”
Then you realize that the garbage truck is about to unload onto your front lawn. Suddenly it’s a lot less academic.

That second panel is infuriating, just because it looks just like a shot from a crime show, where someone’s lurking outside the house, creeping up on someone who’s about to be brutally murdered. It’s infuriating, because sadly that’s not happening, but that one panel lets you dream.

This could be a metaphor for the strip itself. We have a boring psycho who pretty much lives in a bunker in Cloud Cuckoo Land spending way too long on boring non-jokes that no one could possibly be interested in….and then we have Dinkle and his King Charles’s Head to contend with as well.